A blog dedicated to the rational discussion of politics and current events.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

That’s mighty white of you, ‘Cock-Asians’ (the right wing’s term)

You can't make up the racist right-wing crazy that wants to repudiate the term Caucasian as a descriptive category for white people, as used by government agencies like the Census bureau. Apparently, those on the right have a problem with people from the Caucuses Mountains, which include Chechnya, being referred to as white people, in describing their ethnicity or race. Because they believe it refers to individuals they consider Asian, not good proper western European white people, they go further to make a racist, sexist slur out of the term. Bo Sears, and his resisting defamation project is part of the broader white supremacist movement...but not the Caucasian supremacist movement. The white supremacists are celebrated on the right, notably at and by CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) where these groups host seminars arguing for the domination of America exclusively by those who are white, and western European in descent and preference. Other people, including our indigenous peoples, are second class at best, if they're considered legitimate Americans at all.

The right tries to protest that they are not racists, but they do not repudiate people who think like this. Therefore, the term fits, and it fits so tightly that they aren't going to be getting rid of it any time soon, any more than they will be shedding their skins.

Cross posted from where I originally wrote it, on MN Progressive Project:

That’s mighty white of you, ‘Cock-Asians’ (the right wing’s term)

by Dog Gone on April 22, 2013

As
we come down from the suspense of last week’s terrorist events, and our
nation’s armed response to it from the democratic mayor, governor, and
president, I am struck by several of the partisan divides in how we
respond to such events that highlight the problems of polarization, and
especially right wing ignorance.

Last week, the day after the marathon bombing, U.S. News and other
media reported the two year study by the Constitution Project on the
worse than useless efforts of the Bush administration in engaging in
torture post-9/11.

Does anyone here think that the right wingers would be calling for
torture if the bombers had not been recent immigrants, and were typical
right winger White Supremacists? Not bloody likely.

During last week, we had one (alleged) bomber shot while wearing a
suicide vest, trying to injure law enforcement with explosives, and
engaging in what became a fatal shootout for both the older of the two
bombers, and for an MIT campus law enforcement officer. Over the
weekend, the other suspect was taken into custody.

Immediately we have a right wing nut, New York state senator Greg
Ball, calling for torture — because never mind that it produced nothing
of value, nothing of intelligence that could not better have been
acquired through other techniques of traditional interrogation that work
so much better, that have greater morality and legality.
And once again we have the GOP representing the ‘value’ party of stupid
AND vicious, falsely labeling that patriotism. As noted by the Huff Po:

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no
justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our
capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially
increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.”

It makes the right FEEL good to abuse people towards whom they are
hostile or antipathetic, and the right consistently engages in that kind
of emotional rather than rational thinking. It reflects both the
violent tendencies of the right along with the absence of objective,
fact based thinking. It also reflects deeply held beliefs and attitudes
that are never going to attract African American, Latino and Hispanic,
or Asian American voters, no matter how much they spend or campaign to
achieve broader voter outreach.

This is about stupidity and the desire for revenge, the desire to
hurt someone we have in custody because we can, not because it is
genuinely productive to do so, and certainly not because it is useful to
do so, or moral to do so. Don’t confuse a conservative with the facts;
they won’t accept them anyway. It will, as we saw with the Bush
administration, encourage them to lie however, about their actions and
the results of their actions. We’ve seen repeatedly that the right will
lie up a storm to justify doing what they want, no matter how wrong, no
matter how bad it is. They will find every justification they can think
of to do so, and frequently double down on their pretexts after getting
caught being wrong, and lying. Notably this has been true of Dubya and
his puppet-masterVeep Cheney.

But the other thing the right has to do to justify torture is to look
at the person they wish to torture as less of a human being, as less
than themselves, as a very specific kind of ‘other’. In the case of
immigrants, they are not American, so we can abuse them to our hearts’
content; in the case of naturalized Americans, they are not AS American,
their Americanization doesn’t count in the balance. If someone is not
white, preferably male, and Christian – preferably of the extreme or
fundamental religious right – then they don’t count as human either; in
all cases, this is true of people who are Muslim, or who the right
perceives as Muslim-like, such as Hindus and Sikhs.

Rather- as we have seen year after year at CPAC – the right likes to
distinguish between European and white, and everyone else. In their eyes
ONLY white European descended Americans in the United States, who have
ancestors who came here a number of generations back, should be the
dominant governing and economic demographic.

Just when we think the right couldn’t show themselves to be more
racist, and more ignorant, we have opposition to the census designation
of people from the Chechnya region of Russia, in the Caucuses Mountains,
from which the more technical, more official term for ‘white’ is
derived. Yes, the right wing nuts are objecting to the two bomber
suspects being identified as white, AND they are objecting to the word
Caucasian being used for white people – or Cock-Asian, to turn it into a
further racist slur. It is important to demonize the Chechens
generally, and the bombing suspects specifically, as ‘other’. If you are
on the right, it is essential to dehumanize people when you want to
justify torturing them, and to distance yourself from them as much as
possible; that is absolutely fundamental.

So why are the Tsarnaev brothers not white, at least to
right-wingers? Is it only because they’re Muslim? Muslim immigrants? Or
is it because they’re “bad,” and whiteness must be surrendered when
white people are bad?

Over its long history America has regularly featured a process of
sorting white from non-white, even among European immigrant groups. I’m
not a huge admirer of the now-dated whiteness studies academic movement,
but those scholars did help illuminate the way various groups of
European immigrants, particularly the Irish, but also Jews, Italians and
Eastern Europeans, “became” white over time, in a complicated process
of determined assimilation, gradually lessening prejudice by existing
“white” society, and most important, the arrival of newcomers to take
the place of the scapegoated non-white other, alongside the definitive
non-white scapegoats, African-Americans. Embracing racism and
xenophobia, sadly, could be a shortcut to white status for previously
non-white European immigrants.

These days, though, Americans of Russian or Chechen descent are
unambiguously categorized as “white” by the U.S. Census Bureau, which
says it counts as white all “people having origins in any of the
original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It
includes people who reported ‘White’ or wrote in entries such as Irish,
German, Italian, Lebanese, Near Easterner, Arab, or Polish.” As I wrote
Friday, the anguished outburst of Ruslan Tsarni, the brothers’ uncle in
Maryland, was the quintessentially American cry of a newcomer wanting to
be identified as a good, patriotic American – not necessarily as white,
but certainly not as suspicious “other.”

So conservatives’ insistence the Tsarnaevs are absolutely not white is curious, to say the least.

Coincidentally or not, this weekend I got an email from Bo Sears, the
head of Resisting Defamation, a conservative organization lobbying for
the rights of white Americans as a “diverse demographic affinity group,”
with the subject line “No to Caucasian.” Sears wrote:

Now that the diverse white American peoples are
becoming a minority in many states, counties, and cities, we wanted to
let you know that we have the right to name and label ourselves. And we
don’t like being called a word that sounds like “cock-Asian.”

It would be easier to take Sears’ request seriously if he wasn’t
appearing to take offense at the “Asian” part of Caucasian (with the
kind of juvenile reference to “cock,” which had frankly never occurred
to me), and also if he wasn’t regularly complaining about an “anti-white
narrative” in the mainstream media and calling me personally an
anti-white racist. But I wrote him back to ask what he thought whites
should be called, whether he sent his broadside against the term
“Caucasian” because of the Tsarnaevs, and whether considered the
Tsarnaevs “white.” He answered:

We are far too small an organization to attempt
to speak affirmatively about a precise name & label for the diverse
white American demographic affinity group..no, we’ve been working on the
anti-Cock-Asian message in that email for a couple of weeks.
Purely coincidence…based on an upsurge here and there to smother our
diversity and nationality with “Cock-Asian.” …To answer your question:
the only people who could say that the brothers Tsarnaev were among the
diverse white American people would be the Tsarnaevs. You don’t quite
understand that Resisting Defamation is not in the border-drawing,
definition-making business…we merely resist the campaign of hate speech
that we see coming at us.

Interesting enough. But Sears also included a long exegesis of what
it meant that that Tamarlan Tsarnaev had the name of the bloody 15th
century central Asian-Muslim warlord Tamerlane, which he said was akin
“to naming an American child ‘Stalin-Mao-Hitler.” Which seemed to
indicate he considered the Tsarnaevs more Asian, or maybe “Cock-Asian,” than good old fashioned American white.

The right wing is eager to call for the torture of anyone they can
identify and pillory as ‘other’, as ‘them’ in the us vs. them divide
that classifies other or them as less than fully human, less than equal,
less than deserving of humane treatment or moral and ethical response.
The right erodes their own claims to humanity by supporting inhumane
action, even as they are striving loudly and vigorously to deny the
humanity of others. The only values on the right are failed ones. The
extent to which they will distort and contort rational thinking and
objective fact is a testament to how driven by fear, suspicion, and
outright racist hatred to do so. It is one ore reason why,so long as the
right remains who they are, as they are, that we cannot allow them
anywhere near power, authority, or decision making. They do bad things
when they have it, and they clearly want to do more bad things that will
disgrace us and put us at greater risk, not protect us from harm.
Rather, we need to be protected from them, from their violent
tendencies, from their willful, hateful, racist ignorance and stupidity.

An afterthought – in case any of our readers are wondering if the
right will be abandoning the word caucus – they might, but not because
it has anything to do with Russia or the Caucuses region of Asia. It is a
word derived from the Native American tongue used by the Algonquin
Indian tribe. That might be too brown a term for them, if any of the
scholars or pseudo-scholars ever bother to look it up. No loss of
voters for them if they do; they don’t seem to do well among Native
American voters either, and are not likely to do so anytime soon.

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